Monday, October 13, 2014

When Granny had dinner with the Mufti

The Grand Mufti at his meeting with Adolph Hitler in November 1941

Rachel Wahba's Singapore-born grandma thought all educated people were progressive - until friends invited her to have dinner with the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti. Interesting vignette in the Times of Israel:

Granny didn’t understand. Coming from a modernized country how could she comprehend her new reality?

The family knew their place. She didn’t.

“Of course I talked back, I wasn’t scared,” and that was her problem, at home and outside the home.

She made friends, non-Jewish friends, “outside
the family.” It was unheard of in the deeply insulated and fearful
Jewish community of Baghdad in the 1930’s.

She wanted to socialize with “modern” people, intellectuals who spoke English and had interesting parties.

She met a young non-Jewish Syrian couple, a
doctor and his wife, who were enchanted by her. “They loved me so much,
they were Muslim and they loved me so much, ‘you are not like the other
Jews, we like you,’” they told her.

She felt embraced by this couple and their eclectic group of Muslim and Christian friends.

Granny loved it all and defied the family. She refused to give up her freedom.

“They, (the Jews) were like mice, I didn’t
understand,” Granny said; until the dinner party where the guest of
honor was none other than Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem.

She sat in stunned silence as he spun his
diatribe against the Jews of Palestine, Jews of Iraq, and the Jews of
the world. She sat there quietly “like a mouse,” as a fear she had never
felt before drowned out his words.

She never imagined “educated people” sitting
around a dinner table listening to his plan to ethnically cleanse Jews
out of the Middle East. She felt the hate and heard the silence of her
friends.

I asked her what on earth was she thinking,
how did she manage to sit at a table with the infamous Jew hater, the
Grand Mufti? The man who went to Germany to meet and discuss the Final
Solution in Arab lands as well as Europe, with his idol, Adolph Hitler.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought it was
only the hooligans on the streets who wanted to hurt us. Not these
people, they were educated.”

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)